About this blog
Opera Watch, an Opera browser blog, is run by Daniel Goldman, who used to work for Opera Software as a Technical Evangelist.
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Opera Mini
Opera Tips
- Fixing Performance and Stability Issues
- How to remove a (mis)typed-in address in Opera?
- How to get StumbleUpon to work in Opera and Safari
- Tip: Opera Mini power-user settings
- How to translate foreign languages in Opera?
- Tip: Prevent Opera Mini from re-installing on each startup
- Opera tip: How to open closed pop-ups?
- Opera tip: CTRL+Spacebar opens homepage
- How to remove the notifications for blocked pop-ups in Opera?
- Give commands to Opera using your voice (Video)
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Contact
Daniel Goldman: daniel@operawatch.com.
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Daniel Goldman
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Official Opera blogs
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Note: I encourage you to copy and translate my blog posts to your non-English blog. Do you have an Opera blog (with more than 90% of the content Opera-related)? Let me know and I'll add it to the list above.
About Opera
Q: What is Opera?
A: Opera is one of the most powerful Web browsers around. A Web browser is the program that allows you to view Web pages. Opera is well known for innovation for PC browsers and bringing the full web to mobile phones and devices.
Q: Is Opera free?
A: Absolutely free.
Q: Why should I download a browser? Doesn't my computer already come with one for free?
A: It's about getting more out of the time you spend on the internet. Opera is designed to be much faster than these browsers and gives you powerful features that the default browser lacks. Default browsers like Internet Explorer are also more likely to be subjected to dangerous software such as viruses and spyware.
Q: Will Opera keep me safe from fraudulent websites and malicious hackers?
A: According to Secunia, a respected firm that tracks security in browsers, Opera has the best reputation and track record when it comes to browser security. Keeping our users safe from security vulnerabilities, fraudulent websites, and malicious hackers is a top priority for Opera. Opera is maintained by hundreds of engineers, developers and security experts who are constantly looking to make the browser even safer.
Q: Doesn't Opera copy all of their features from other browsers?
A: Absolutely not. In fact, many of the features that are popular in other browsers today were invented and pioneered by Opera a long time ago. Opera invented the precursor to tabs (in 1994), Page Zoom (1994), was the first browser to block pop-up ads (2000), first to add a Search field in the browser toolbar (2000), Sessions (1996), deleting private data (2000), Mouse Gestures (2000), User JavaScript (2005), BitTorrent support (2005), Widgets (2006), Speed Dial (2007), and much more.
Q: Does Opera support extensions, such as those found in Firefox?
A: Much of the functionality provided through Firefox extensions is already built directly into Opera, so you don't have to download additional extensions in Opera. In addition, Opera is highly customizable and supports all standard plug-ins.
Q: Can I also use Opera on my mobile phone?
A: Yes. And your Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS or almost any connected device and mobile phones. Opera Mobile oftens comes preinstalled from the manufacturers, but if it doesn't you can install Opera Mini which runs on nearly all phones.
Q: This all sounds great, so how do I download Opera?
A: -- Opera on your computer
-- Opera Mini on your phone
-- Opera Mobile on your phone
-- or learn more about Opera at www.opera.com
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SUPER!!
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Fantastic! Nice one guys, lot of nostalgia in there, its come a long way from when I first started using Opera 4, it was good then and exceptional now, well done!
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Great vid! Hip and cool!
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You would not happen to have a non‐Flash version too? (Or at least the decency to include an alternate text in your Flash embedding?)
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Daniel Aleksandersen, I know there’s a wmv format somewhere on opera.com, but I guess it won’t do much good for you.
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Wow, what a video. Very well made.
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Daniel Goldman, mplayer and vlc player should be able to deal with wmv files on linux
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Till I forget the video is good.
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live long and prosper !!
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great! what is the name of song in background?
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Well made video, it made me laugh a few times. I liked the Opera Man and Acid face.
Once you cut out the fluff and mobile browsers, though, It’s kind of depressing how much things slowed on the desktop after 2003. Also, I think Opera 7 should have got more respect. That’s the most remarkable Opera release in recent memory.
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Well it looks like the Opera Marketing people are getting it together. Very much liked that.
(Though maybe being a long time user I’m the wrong market for it)
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That was a great video!
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Cool video!
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*caugh*
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“how much things slowed on the desktop after 2003″
Slowed??
You clearly haven’t been paying attention
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Haha, I guess you’re right, mmmh.
Slowed in feature development, then.
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Really? Slowed?
Opera 7.0 was released in 2003. What did we have before that?
Version 5 was basically just 4.x with ads, and added some nice stuff like gestures.
Version 6 added Unicode.
Version 7 was a rewrite.
But since 7 there have been at least two, three or more major rewrites of Opera’s core. We’ve also gotten stuff like opera:config, BitTorrent, widgets, custom searches, new installer, source viewer, upgrade notifications, content blocker, etc.
Hardly slower.
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I know you just came up with that list off the top of your head, but there is a lot of fluff in it - new installers, upgrade notifications, and source viewer shouldn’t count, they’re super minor things.
When it comes down to it, the big features of the post-7 (or post 7.5, I thought 7.5 was a great release) are a handful of things like the content blocker, BitTorrent, widgets, top ten lists, speed dial, etc. There’s two problems with that - firstly, the number of significant features and changes are pretty limited considering the four or so years that Opera could have spent their time developing new stuff in, and secondly, that most of the new features are either badly done or gimmicky. BitTorrent is still pretty worthless, widgets are an insane concept that only have vague relevance for Opera Mobile (maybe), speed dial loses its novelty quickly, and now the amazing new sync functionality seems more like a vague attempt to catch up to equivalent Firefox plugins than a way to actually blaze a trail and make new innovative things for users.
In all, I really do think Opera desktop development has slowed, and gone off track. Severe UI issues are either ignored or patched up with occasional layout reshuffles, IRC and mail functionality have been totally ignored, the plugins that everyone clamours for are seemingly never on the way, Wand is still awkward, and more importantly, nothing has been done to make our browsing lives easier to the extent that things like mouse gestures or tabs did. Opera has admirably kept up to date with rendering engine improvements, but I think there’s been a measure of stagnation on the features front. Especially when there are so many possibilites to consider, and Opera has so many people working on the browser!
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As lamarca said: live long and prosper !!
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Opera has come a long way, I think that it is best that it’s developers look to take the product into niche markets.
- Shelon Padmore
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“Opera desktop development has slowed”
Nonsense. It’s become more capable faster than any time before. With two or three major revisions of the core since 7.0 it goes without saying that it’s developing faster than ever.
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Core revisions aren’t really a purely desktop feature - I think the desire to speed up Opera Mobile would have been one of the primary motivations for revising the rendering engine. And if you read what I write, I accept that there have been rendering improvements since 7, but feature and UI revisions have been lackluster.
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The song is Busy Child by Crystal Method, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmWWjW0iRf8 (it was also used in the Electronic Arts “Fifa 98″ game - that’s how I found the tile :-p )
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“feature and UI revisions have been lackluster”
Except a new and much better UI (Opera 7 was cluttered), new preferences, opera:config, content blocker, etc.
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krup, I addressed that in an earlier post. It’s lackluster. Opera 7 had a bad UI, but all they’ve done since 7 is replaced the menu layout .ini file with a slightly more sane one. It’s been years and years since Opera 7 and there’s been few usability improvements of consequence since.
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You are wrong, SuitCase. There have been lots of them, including opera:config, spell checking, content blocking, speed dial, new UI, etc. You can try to explain away the new UI after Opera 7 all you want to, but the fact is that it was a HUGE usability improvement. You can’t just ignore facts that don’t match your claims.
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jub, oh, spell checking? You mean the one that was added in late 2004 and hasn’t been touched since despite being almost useless due to the lack of inline checking? And again, while content blocking is legitimately innovative, it’s not a hugely useful feature, and speed dial is fluff, as I mentioned earlier.
The Opera UI _has_ stagnated, and while it has been tweaked to be better over time, the considerable revamp it really needs has not come. Anyone I show Opera to is still overwhelmed by it, and those of us on alternate platforms have been almost entirely neglected. http://img.soaringrabbit.com/opera-macevolution.png I made this image some months ago, and it reflects this - both the insensitivity to Mac UI and the extremely gradual evolution of an interface that’s probably the most inaccessible and confusing of browsers that attempt to appeal to the mainstream.
You can keep defending it, but 2004 was a long time ago and I can name tons of apps that have improved (or been written from scratch) since then. Opera’s only real achievements on the desktop in the last few years have been related to the renderer and stability fixes, and these are not where it so desperately needs help.
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SuitCase, you were the one who said “since 2003″. Looks like you can’t quite make up your mind here! Now it’s 2004? If you are going to keep contradicting yourself you might as well give up.
UI has stagnated? Ever considered that maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe it’s a good thing to do it right and keep it that way unless there’s a good reason to change it? Duh.
But now it’s 2004, is it? Well clearly you are going to keep ignoring facts, or better yet, move your goalpost every time you are proven wrong. Pathetic.
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jub, er, that’s hardly the point is it? I’m not confusing 2003 or 2004 at all, I’m well aware that 7.5 came out after 7.0. You’re trying to argue that development on Opera for the desktop is not stagnating, but I just pointed out a feature that was introduced soon after 7.0 and has stagnated since, despite needing a lot more work to be useful. Do you really think Opera’s spell checking is a good example to show when trying to prove that Opera is actively improving on their browser all the time?
UI has stagnated. This is subjective so I can’t “prove” you wrong. But just consider how Firefox took over the niche browser market with its IE6-like UI, and how Opera could have possibly failed as badly as it has to capture new marketshare. Anecdotally, I find it’s often due to the UI, and Opera has so many talented people they could have been doing 7.0-like revisions yearly to make the UI completely powerful, accessible and innovative. They didn’t, and so Opera 9.5 looks and works approximately the same as Opera 7.0, give or take a toggleable toolbar.
Stop getting so mad about this. Is Opera your girlfriend or something? Just realise you’re talking to the person who wrote http://www.soaringrabbit.com/opera/operaold.html and angered a ton of Firefox fans in the process (I still get great refererer links in my Apache logs to discussion threads and such.) I want Opera desktop to get better, I just think that Opera has concentrated mainly on the mobile\gadget market for the past few years and is not nearly as committed to Opera desktop as they were when it was a commercial product.
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VERY cool! Thanks for posting this!
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Simple but really nice and funny video (the “Ajax on TV” joke killed me)!
I hope you keep on working in the best browser(s) ever for, at least, 12 years more.
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Hehe, now SuitCase is changing his story again! Now it’s just one feature!
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What are you talking about, krup? I never said anything about there being zero new features in Opera in the past few years. I’ve said development of useful features has slowed down.
Besides, even if you did surprise me with one great new feature I’ve forgotten, that does not diminish my argument much. Opera desktop’s development has gone off track since it went free and it’s been less and less relevant since.
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You are wrong, SuitCase. There have been lots of them, including opera:config, spell checking, content blocking, speed dial, new UI, etc. You can try to explain away the new UI after Opera 7 all you want to, but the fact is that it was a HUGE usability improvement. You can’t just ignore facts that don’t match your claims.
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Wow, I totally haven’t heard anyone mention those features before, and I definitely haven’t responded to them.
Talk about “explaining away” all you like, but in the context of the real world, Opera’s dinky little updates through the past four years pale in comparison to those made by tons of apps out there, many with far smaller development teams. It is a shame for Opera desktop, which used to move much faster in years past. Why is it so hard to grasp that this has happened, when it makes clear business sense for Opera to focus their development on the much more profitable mobile space?
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Suitcase: Seeing as everyone else seems to be only able to look instead of read (given the number of repeated points you’ve had to make) I thought you could do with some support, I actually agree with you on a lot of your points, its still without a doubt an excellent browser and although I don’t wish to belittle what the desktop team have achieved, the feature set has started to lag behind not always other browsers but also Opera’s own reputation.
The only thing I wonder, and this is probably more a point for Daniel to comment on, is how much Opera is really concentrating on the desktop market, I think in many ways its been perhaps ever so slightly sidelined. The video after all seems to put far more emphasis on Operas mobile prowess over that of its desktop counterpart. Also, I’m sure to someone new to Opera, even from Firefox it could appear potentially daunting, the GUI has some pretty major differences after all. Perhaps this could be an installer option to make it look closer to IE or FF so that people can get used to it slowly rather than being thrown in at the deep end.
As a side note, its also interesting that most of the replies countering your posts are from users who don’t appear to be using Opera, perhaps just browser identification but still…
Just my 2p (£)
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What SuitCase is basically saying is that “Opera hasn’t done what I wanted them to do, so the development has gone off track”.
He seems to think that Opera is focusing more on the “mobile space” when the fact is that Opera’s desktop team is bigger than ever, and desktop revenues have increased by more than 100% several quarters in a row because of more users. Desktop makes up about a quarter of Opera’s total revenues. In order to think that Opera is focusing their development elsewhere, one must be unaware of these simple facts that can be found in Opera’s quarterly presentations, and in various employee blogs.
Why do people like SuitCase insist on making assumptions about what Opera is focusing on, as if his uninformed opinion on what Opera is actually focusing on carries any weight?
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Because the browser kinda sucks and hasn’t gone anywhere significant in years? I’m not pulling this out of my ***, I’ve followed Opera for years and it’s an observation I’ve made.
It’s interesting to note the revenue increase on the desktop side - that surprises me, actually, I thought the plan was to take a hit on the browser front so as to get Opera’s name out there. Such increases of the desktop team’s size are irrelevant, though, if they continue to focus on things like further standards support, small screen rendering, and widgets, because these features to me seem like they’re more applicable to all Opera browsers than the desktop alone. My guess is that if the desktop team has expanded, the reason their product isn’t as exciting as it once was is because they’re doing a lot of the development of Opera’s fundamentals that the Mobile, Wii, etc teams base their work upon.
Regardless, you can wail about how I’m only unimpressed because the new features of Opera don’t suit me, or that I somehow change my story every post I make because I concede that there _are_ new features, but I keep returning to the same point - in spite of its big development team, and severe usability problems, and tiny marketshare, Opera desktop has not really progressed in the places it should do, and instead all of the exciting development work coming out of Opera is on the mobile front. It seems to reflect a company-wide focus on the mobile space that was not as big a deal back in, say, 2000-2003, when desktop development was rapid and the browser made big improvements on a (bi-\tri-) monthly basis. This is no longer the case.
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…according to you.
Shows how much you actually know, I guess.
The key words being “to me”. Yes, we know, you are the center of the universe…
No, that would be the people working on the rendering engine. Not the desktop people.
According to the person who thinks the universe revolves around him…
That’s funny, because in the mobile forums at my.opera.com, everyone is complaining about how slowly Opera Mobile is progressing… They’ve been stuck at version 8 for ages now.
Yeah yeah, keep making up stuff.
Apparently you don’t know how the market works, you don’t know what Opera does, you don’t know what products are progressing at what speed, etc. You basically don’t seem to know much of anything, and yet you make all these outlandish claims about how Opera’s ignoring the desktop, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
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Wow, you’re a smarty. I feel really bad now that you showed my post to be nothing other than egocentrism with no basis in reality. I will now return to my empty life of trying to prove I’m the centre of the world in random posts on web browser news blogs.
Ignoring the fact you sidestepped like half of my post with silly namecalling, I suppose my retort to the thing about Opera Mobile would be that it seems like many of the advances made with Opera’s renderer in the past few years relate to mobile browsing - SSR being the major one, but widgets and sync too. And of course the obsessive drive to make it faster, which is relevant and useful in the mobile space but completely irrelevant to the goal of expanding their marketshare on the desktop. From my perspective that shows a compay-wide bias towards Opera Mobile, but if the consensus is that Opera Mobile is moving sluggishly too, I guess it doesn’t hurt my case to suppose that Opera Software has become lazy and entirely confused as opposed to skilled but mobile-obsessed.
Anyway, you’re welcome to return to my previous post that addressed what you said. I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong - in fact I could be, if Opera 10 turns out to be revolutionary and great. But I think I’m pretty familiar with what Opera has actually released in the past few years, and it lines up with my argument logically.
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And you soup know it all the best [sarcasm]
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I started using Opera with version 7 and haven’t looked back ever since.